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“I just always felt that there’s enough to go around.”
That’s one of Julie Mancini’s favorite phrases. If you’d known her, you might have muttered under your breath, “Easy for you to say.” Mancini always seemed powered by an invisible generator that never stopped running.
Her smile didn’t just light up the room. It reached into your heart. You couldn’t help but smile back.
The impact she had on Portland’s cultural climate is hard to overstate. She was a key force behind Literary Arts, Mercy Corps, and the Writers in the Schools program, worked for children at College Possible Oregon and the Children’s Institute and helped launch Caldera, an arts- and nature-focused program for young people.
She made Portlanders—and the rest of the country—feel like our city deserved a place in the literary world.
Mancini first made her mark when she took over Portland Arts & Lectures in 1985, transforming it from small audiences at the First Congregational Church to sell-out crowds at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. She brought in an astonishing list of speakers—Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, and Philip Roth, to name a few—cementing Portland’s reputation as a town that revered writers. Soon PAL was the largest literary lecture series in the nation.
She grew it further in 1993, by merging with Oregon Institute of Literary Arts (now the Oregon Book Awards & Fellowships program) to create the statewide organization now known as Literary Arts, which she ran for 15 years. In 1997, she founded Writers in the Schools, now Literary Arts Youth Programs.
Literary Arts continues to thrive and will soon move to a new headquarters at 716 SE Grand Ave. With a bookstore and cafe, the new HQ will bring Literary Arts to even more Portlanders, with classroom and event space, writing areas, staff offices, and a recording studio for its radio show and podcast The Archive Project.
On juliefuckingmancini.com, the memorial website set up by Peter Bromka, Mancini’s son, he wrote: “Julie was a force of nature, and this is intended to celebrate and share the impact she had on all of us.”
Dozens of people told tales of Mancini’s unflagging spirit and tireless support. She had the magical ability to believe in the best of people, to push and prod and cajole them until they got there, and to have a whole lot of fun doing it.
Celebrate Julie Mancini: She’d want you to donate time, energy, or money to one of the organizations she felt so passionately about. The Children’s Institute and College Possible have memorial funds in her name. Listen to an interview with Julie conducted by Andrew Proctor at The Archive Project.
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